In the few years since Best Coast formed, the band’s rigorous touring schedule has allowed frontwoman Bethany Cosentino to travel the world. Despite the many exotic locales she’s visited, some of her favourite moments on the road have occurred in the seemingly banal surroundings of shopping malls.

“It gives me this spark of nostalgia, and it just makes me really happy,” the singer-guitarist enthuses. “When we go on tour and we go somewhere very suburban and there’s a mall, I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m going there,’ because it reminds me of being 15 years old.”

This affection for retail shopping is a result of Cosentino’s upbringing as a “valley girl”—an often-pejorative term she’s proud to embrace.

“We use the kind of lingo we use because we grew up hearing it,” she explains by phone from her home in Los Angeles. “We have weird accents, and we say ‘like’ too much. There’s a whole stereotype around valley girls, and to be honest with you, [the 1995 film] Clueless is not really painting a picture that’s different from what it actually is like. It’s pretty much the truth.”

Cosentino’s California roots play a crucial role in the music that she and collaborator Bobb Bruno make as Best Coast. This is particularly true of “The Only Place”, the title cut from the band’s 2012 sophomore LP, which features the refrain “We’ve got the ocean/Got the babes/Got the sun/We’ve got the waves.” The musical accompaniment is appropriately sprightly, as warm vocal harmonies soar over jangling guitars and bouncy rhythms.

Elsewhere on The Only Place, the songwriter pines for a life of laid-back simplicity, concluding that “nowhere compares to home” on the alt-country flavoured “Let’s Go Home” and bemoaning her frenzied schedule on “Last Year”. Cosentino penned most of these tracks in Los Angeles during brief breaks between lengthy tours.

“I always write about being miserable, even though I’m not miserable all the time,” she says of the album’s often-glum subject matter. “For as long as I’ve been writing music, it’s always been sad, but I write happy melodies.”

Best Coast’s past work was frequently doused in reverb and fuzz, but The Only Place finds the group stripping away the sonic muck and adopting a more pristine pop sound. “We did it at Capitol Studios, which is a legendary studio,” Cosentino notes. “We did it with Jon Brion, who’s a really acclaimed producer. We wanted to do something different—we didn’t want to go into this studio and spend all this time and money making a record that sounded like it had been made kind of like the first one was made.”

But while the album traces the outfit’s growth from a humble DIY project into a polished indie-rock powerhouse, fans can expect Cosentino to remain true to her valley girl roots.

“I don’t feel that I’ve changed, and I don’t feel that success has made me any different,” she says. “I think that if you asked anybody that knew me, they’d say I’m still the same weirdo I was before.”